Photo: Stephen Brackett | By Catie Cheshire, Westword | After last call on July 17 last year, shots echoed outside Larimer Beer Hall, at the intersection of 20th and Larimer streets, the dividing line between LoDo and the Ballpark neighborhoods. While confronting Jordan Waddy, a 23-year-old club-goer with a gun who’d been in an altercation that night, three Denver Police Department officers fired their weapons, injuring six bystanders and Waddy, who never fired his gun.
A grand jury decided to indict one of those officers, Brandon Ramos; both he and Waddy are now making their way through the legal system.
It was the most dramatic episode in decades of problems when bars and clubs in the LoDo, Ballpark and, now, RiNo neighborhoods let out, but it had pundits once again wringing their hands over what they consider a Denver in decay.
And even those who recognize that reputation as overblown think Denver could use an infusion of energy and a redirection if it’s going to draw people back downtown and support the live-music venues and other creative outposts already there.
“It’s very urgent,” says Stephen Brackett, founding member of the band Flobots and nonprofit Youth on Record, and currently Colorado’s Music Ambassador. “We have an opportunity to course-correct for the city, and we have this very small window, and if we don’t…it feels like cultural erosion is what’s happening. We’re just losing more and more of the topsoil. The identity of the city is being wiped away. As much as that means a lot to me as someone who has lived in Denver my whole life, it also has devastating impacts for what makes a city successful.”
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Read the rest here:
https://www.westword.com/news/denver-night-mayor-bring-back-culture-safety-downtown-17031605
[Thanks to Alex Teitz for contributing this article! http://www.femmusic.com]
[Mr. Brackett was a recent speaker for a COMBO meeting. If you didn’t Zoom in, you missed a really good talk on the state of music and the music industry in Colorado.]
June 22, 2023| Music-Related Business| Barb Dye